The agent looked slightly uncomfortable. "She made a complete copy of all Justice League member files."
Thea went still.
She'd assumed this was aimed at the human level. The target wasn't after humanity in general—her objective was the Justice League specifically.
Just as Thea was weighing whether to handle this personally, the tracking analysis returned.
"Target vector: Alabama."
Thea raised her hand. "Move out."
In a lightweight civilian suit, she launched from the facility at a relaxed pace. Her team scrambled their mechs and fell in behind her.
Less than thirty minutes later, they hovered outside an auto repair shop on a quiet stretch of highway.
"Thermal signature confirmed—all targets still inside. Heat readings inconsistent with human biology."
"Strike pattern. All four are non-terrestrial." Thea signaled her team and stepped back. She was the Commissioner—minor field engagements didn't require her immediate personal involvement.
Integrating years of salvaged extraterrestrial technology, the Commission's arsenal had grown considerably. All five agents raised their weapons in unison—over a dozen acoustic concussion rounds hit the building in a single burst.
The lone auto shop on the highway shoulder was blown cleanly off its foundation. Four figures burst from the wreckage.
A heavyset man with a broad face, flanked by two women with blank, expressionless eyes—those three were loosely clustered. Five meters away stood a separate figure: a woman with flaxen hair and tawny skin.
These look... completely human. Several agents hesitated.
"I'll take responsibility. They are not human—or not entirely. Bring them all in." She had seen enough. Their internal body structures diverged from normal human physiology. That was sufficient grounds.
An order is an order. Diggle led the charge at the heavyset man, who read as most dangerous. Agent Fanna broke off toward Voodoo, their primary target. The remaining three engaged the expressionless women.
Commission agents weren't known for gentleness. Brutal training, no sentiment—and with Thea's guarantee of cover, all five came in at full force from the opening second.
Diggle activated the mech's assault configuration. Over the low throb of the startup sequence, a howling energy saw screamed to life—with cutting speed extraordinary, driving straight at the heavyset man.
The others were equally unsparing. Some favored ranged weapons; others close-quarters. The mechs amplified every specialty tenfold, a hundredfold, and brought that amplification down on the enemy at full intensity.
The heavyset man hadn't expected them to hit this hard. He shifted in a scrambling rush—skin darkening to brown-black, coarse black fur erupting across his body, frame enlarging, his jaw wrenching open to a ninety-degree angle and revealing green fangs around a barb-covered tongue, his small eyes going flat and crimson.
The two women beside him shifted in the same instant. Their skulls compressed and distorted into octopus-like domes. The hair at the backs of their heads whipped loose and became slick, grasping tentacles. Their skin turned pale blue. Their arms, legs, and torsos sprouted rows of barbs. Fingers fused in pairs—index with middle, ring with pinky—forming narrow, claw-like appendages.
"Charming," Thea said, quietly glad she'd stayed back. None of these features looked like natural development—the genetic architecture was chaotic at a fundamental level.
Voodoo, by comparison, looked almost normal. Her entire body was encased in crocodilian plating, thick scales running head to foot, paired with oversized claws and a gaping reptilian maw. If she showed up to the club looking like this, Thea suspected even the hungriest patrons in New Orleans would reconsider.
A sweep of brilliant green light arced across her peripheral vision.
"Hal? Didn't realize you were in the area—I didn't flag this one to the League."
"Passing through. Ring picked up a high-energy reading, so I came to look." Hal Jordan ran his eyes over the four combatants. "What exactly are these?"
"Human-based hybrids with extraterrestrial and animal gene modifications. I can't ID the alien strain from here. Run them through your ring—the Oa database is considerably more thorough than our Yellow Lantern archives."
Hal pointed the ring at each figure in sequence. The response was immediate: "Dominator bio-experiments."
"More than experiments, I'd wager," Thea said. "They came in with a specific objective. That one—" she nodded toward Voodoo, "—just hit a D.E.O. black site and extracted the complete Justice League member database."
Hal Jordan, who'd been treating this as a quick detour, turned serious. The League's formation was publicly known—but moving this rapidly and deliberately to get ahead of it meant organized planning and premeditation.
"You're not jumping in yourself?" Hal watched the field with visible discomfort.
"Still recovering from an old injury." She definitely wasn't going to mention the Yellow Lantern ring—she'd never hear the end of it from Hal. She pulled out her Indigo ring instead and ran a wireless sync, copying the full Dominator file: language records, cultural characteristics, social structure.
She settled in to read. Hal went down to assist. With a Green Lantern in the mix, what had already been a winning fight turned into a controlled demolition.
The two octopus-headed women went down first—heavy-grade sedative injections, power-suppression cuffs secured. As the alien genetic expression was suppressed, they began reverting toward baseline.
The bear-form man took more effort. Diggle took an arm off with the saw. Pushed to the wall, the man attempted to self-destruct. Hal Jordan enclosed him in a solid construct the moment the detonation sequence started, held it until the chain reaction burned out, then released.
Voodoo was the toughest opponent of the four. She didn't rely exclusively on Dominator biotechnology—she'd incorporated the exotic dancer's movement vocabulary directly into her fighting style. Fluid, rhythmic, unpredictable left-right flow with outstanding body control, she ran the team ragged. Thea eventually lost patience and hit her with a paralysis spell. The fight ended.
"Send her to the League for processing, or...?" Hal asked.
Thea considered. On any other day she'd have waved it off and let anyone take whoever they wanted. But this one touched alien intelligence operations—exactly the Commission's mandate. She couldn't responsibly walk away.
"This falls under Commission jurisdiction. You're welcome to observe the interrogation, or I can have a written summary—cleared sections only—forwarded to you. Your call."
"I'll pass. Sector 2814 doesn't run itself." A quick wave, and Hal shot back into the sky.
The agents swept the site—casings, debris, detonation residue—and departed with all three surviving prisoners. Even the self-destructed bear-man had left behind cell samples, collected for later analysis.